The launch of Alphram has resulted in many posts regarding its relationship to Google, and its ability to deliver whatever it is meant to deliver. Certainly, I see it as being a different beast from traditional search, and I regard the initial period of its release as a time in which users will be looking for the systems natural niche. This search will basically be the search for the intersection of expectations and execution.
In our discussions last night following the opening tutorials for ICWSM the topic of the carbon footprint of our conference came up. It occurred to me that this would be a perfect Alphram style query – what is the carbon cost of a flight from Seattle to San Jose? Better yet, compare this with the same journey by train. Given my understanding of the system and having viewed the screencast, my expectation was that this would be where the system could deliver.
Unfortunately, no such luck. I can get it to say something about the distance (seattle san jose) and about the time via plane (seattle san jose airplane), about carbon emissions in general (carbon emissions). Seattle carbon reveals that there is a town in Mexico called carbon (why would that be preferred to the chemical interpretation?).
Is this an extensibility issue (how will Alphram extend its capabilities to estimate some derived cost of a quantity – e.g. the carbon emissions of a flight of a certain duration)? Or a query interpretation problem (it can do it, but I can’t get the query right)?
Interestingly, the obvious search on Google didn’t get a good result but doing the same on Live Search produced a perfect first result.
That's actually really interesting because I would have thought too that WolframAlpha could handle that perfectly... I've been trying to find some usage for "Alphram" but no luck yet. I just can't think anything I would want to search there. Maybe it will be a nice gimmick for drunken arguments about how many people speak english or something.
Posted by: Marko Polojärvi | May 18, 2009 at 11:18 AM
I think Wolfram is about to discover that a search engine that can't search porn and celebrity gossip is darn near useless to 90% of the Internet population. I love the idea behind it. I can't see it taking off in a big way as it is currently implemented. Full name and DOB is all it returns in response to the query {brad pitt}. Not even a list of movies or a picture of his mug. And adding that (in general case, not just for movie stars) means you're now in the long tail game, which is very hard and expensive to play.
Posted by: Dmitriy | May 19, 2009 at 04:06 AM
"Interestingly, the obvious search on Google didn’t get a good result but doing the same on Live Search produced a perfect first result."
Not sure if it's been hit by the buzz yet, but Live Search has improved A LOT recently. Probably it's not as good as Google yet, but certainly neck-to-neck, if not better, than Yahoo!. This will sure be an interesting fight.
Posted by: MDredze | May 19, 2009 at 04:56 PM
Google's top results look right on target to me (or are you discounting sponsored results?):
Your Carbon Footprint - www.CarbonCounter.org
Calculate Your Footprint - www.zerofootprint.net
Carbon Emissions - Carbonfund.org
vs. Live Search's
Flights To Seattle - www.OneTravel.com
Alaska Airlines - www.alaskaair.com
Flight To San Jose - www.expedia.com
Posted by: NGlance | May 25, 2009 at 11:40 AM